Digi-Key has changed and it is not very good

[thinkfat]

Mouser is my to-go source since forever it seems, but sometimes their catalog has holes that DigiKey is usually able to fill.

[David Hess]

I have begun to avoid Newegg after almost 20 years of using them exclusively. They've started that crap of listing reviews for "similar" items along with the ones you really want. The last order I placed I could not log in without allowing JavaScript from Google. They've also added some other script site I didn't notice till I finally placed the order and never got to the confirmation part due to some endlessly spinning doodad. I had to re-log in and check my order history to know it it actually went through. Amazon's prices are just as good and their web site is somewhat less obnoxious.

I have noticed the same thing about Newegg.  I figured it was only a matter of time before their Chinese owner destroyed them.

[james_s]

I have noticed the same thing about Newegg.  I figured it was only a matter of time before their Chinese owner destroyed them.

Where is the place to buy computer parts these days? I suppose the fact that it has all become cheap commodities and volumes have dropped has knocked out all the little hole in the wall no-frills parts vendors. I don't need to buy this stuff often but I do need hard drives and other odds & ends now and then.

[David Hess]

Where is the place to buy computer parts these days? I suppose the fact that it has all become cheap commodities and volumes have dropped has knocked out all the little hole in the wall no-frills parts vendors. I don't need to buy this stuff often but I do need hard drives and other odds & ends now and then.

Newegg has been continuously reducing the variety of parts that they sell in favor of their marketplace sellers.  It was nice to be able to deal with only one company for returns but they are becoming more like Ebay, with scammers included.

Right now I check each part for price and availability on Ebay, Amazon, Newegg, and sometimes random sellers.  I used to be able to buy everything through Newegg.

[rsjsouza]

Where is the place to buy computer parts these days?

Microcenter has a reasonable selection of parts. I am very fortunate to have a store within driving distance.

[David Hess]

Oh, I forgot about Microcenter.  We even have one local although I have never had parts delivered there for pickup.

[radar_macgyver]

It seems at least on Firefox that scrolling is effed up on DK, it's like the 25 parts listed per page are in an iframe and scroll slightly on their own before the "container" scrolls.

[duckduck]

The clincher for me is  DigiKey's policy of FREE shipping if you mail them a check instead of charging.  They usually ship USPS but sometimes UPS.  I can order a single 0.10 resistor and get it shipped free.  The downside is that you have to wait for the mail service but that is typically not a big deal for me.

Is this for real? I've been using Mouser because they offer the US$3.49 "Economy shipping". Delivery takes a while out to the Seattle area, but I'm cheap and electronics is a hobby. I also try to batch my purchases as much as possible.

I'm not a fan of writing checks since handing out my routing and account number is really asking for it. I keep a checking account in a separate bank for this sort of stuff.

EDIT:

It's true! Thanks for the tip, rfdes. From https://www.digikey.com/en/terms-and-conditions :

When a check or money order accompanies your order, Digi-Key pays all shipping and insurance (our choice for method of shipping) to all addresses in the U.S. and Canada.

Here's the mail-in order form: https://www.digikey.com/-/media/PDF/Help/Order%20Form/order-form_en-US.pdf?la=en

It's ironic that as a result of this thread I'm now going to be ordering from Digi-Key rather than Mouser. 

EDIT EDIT:

Well, I ordered two fancy potentiometers for US$5.13 (the price of the potentiometers + local sales taxes). My order form and check was received by Digi-Key on Oct 20 and they shipped Fed-Ex which I received today (Oct 27). Free shipping. This is life-changing to me as an electronics hobbyist. Thanks, Digi-Key 

This site was helpful for calculating the local sales tax: http://www.sale-tax.com

EDIT: updated order form URL

[T3sl4co1l]

It seems at least on Firefox that scrolling is effed up on DK, it's like the 25 parts listed per page are in an iframe and scroll slightly on their own before the "container" scrolls.

Same on Chrome, it doesn't quite fit in its container and scrolls a few pixels.  Once set, the scroll event goes through to the lower level.

Tim

[tooki]

I lost it completely, when all these adafruit and sparkfun boards statrted showing up in the search results.

What's wrong with Adafruit and Sparkfun? They make a lot of things that are handy for beginners, and especially outside of USA, they can be hard to get sometimes. Having access to them via DK is useful, and having them in DK's catalog doesn't somehow make other components less available!

Oh don even let me get started on web development. So for the last two years, I cannot convince our software team, that dumb "let the computer decide" autoscaling on graphs is not good. We have vertical scales like "16.1 16.6 17.0 17.5" because how the data is, and rounding problems. And then we got this gift that keeps on giving, our new website designer. So this bliss, had the idea, that we will replace all fonts with this beautiful, corporate approved font. We have GPS coordinates, and complete excel sheet sized tables, that people work with. decided to use this unreadable font, that gave me complete dyslexia. It took us 3 months to convince her to only use these for the headlines.
Sometimes I thinkk we should just slap these designers back to the earth. We just want a usable, Web 1.0 website, that doesnt have like button and doesnt overwrite the scroll functionality. We dont need your creativity, we need a website. You can create a my little pony fanclub website on your own time, and be creative there.

I couldn't agree more, and I've worked in web design. I am appalled at the direction web (and software) design has taken the past few years, with all the gains in screen size decimated by "airy" layouts that have microscopic amounts of information. Don't get me wrong, not everything in old-style websites was great, but damn…

When I bought my 24" 1920x1200 display in 2008, it gave me massive amounts of screen real estate, so I could easily open two documents side by side, or several web windows, and see plenty of content. Thanks to the dumb "whitespace" layouts of today, on the 27" 2560x1440 display I have now, I can see less content. Absolutely maddening, and IMHO disrespectful of the user. If I want extra space around your content, I'll make the window the size I want and put a blank background behind that window.

What I also hate about modern web technologies is how 99% of the time, they break the "back" functionality. In ages past, clicking "back" just took you right back, every time. Now, even on pages that aren't obviously dynamic, it usually plunks me back at the top of the page, rather than where I was scrolled to before. On dynamic pages like the Facebook timeline, "back" literally does not take you back to where you were, but to a new point in the timeline. The only modern, dynamic site that I have seen where "back" works 100% as it should is Twitter. I don't know how they did it, but they got it exactly, exactly right. They've managed to manipulate the browser history just so, and have their backend designed just so, that together, even with a page reload, you're right where you left off, at the same place in a dynamically loaded timeline. My hats off to them. Now if only I found Twitter itself to be useful...

[rsjsouza]

Ditto in many points above.

The back functionality is also something that gets me everytime - I see myself doing a long click on the back arrow just to see the past recent history with all the entries with the same name - all belongong to the same frame.

That, tied to some browser changes in the action of the backspace key (which acts as a "Back" shortcut) is infuriating when typing on forms in certain pages.

[JoeyG]

I wonder how the manufacturers feel  if they have to support something already sold to some else, but resold through DK?  Warranty is typically for the first  purchaser and not after (unless expressly implied).

I assume DK have a market place vetting program right?

[james_s]

When I bought my 24" 1920x1200 display in 2008, it gave me massive amounts of screen real estate, so I could easily open two documents side by side, or several web windows, and see plenty of content. Thanks to the dumb "whitespace" layouts of today, on the 27" 2560x1440 display I have now, I can see less content. Absolutely maddening, and IMHO disrespectful of the user. If I want extra space around your content, I'll make the window the size I want and put a blank background behind that window.

This is absolutely maddening. I remember working on a 17" 1280x1024 CRT and being able to tile 3 or 4 applications to work with multiple things at once, copy/paste between windows, etc. When I later got a bigger monitor that could do 1600x1200 I could pretty comfortably have two documents side by side and other things like chat program, music player, weather, etc above or below. In recent years there has been this sort of arms race where monitors get higher and higher resolutions so software wastes more and more pixels making everything bigger. It is so infuriating that even interfaces that have several density settings, "compact" is usually 2 or 3 times as bulky and spread out as I want it to be. I'm constantly finding myself setting everything as small as it will go and finding it's still gigantic, I have far more pixels than I had 15 years ago and I can't fit as much information as I could then. UI design has taken huge steps back. What is the point of a super high resolution display if not to fit more stuff on it?!

[james_s]

Ditto in many points above.

The back functionality is also something that gets me everytime - I see myself doing a long click on the back arrow just to see the past recent history with all the entries with the same name - all belongong to the same frame.

That, tied to some browser changes in the action of the backspace key (which acts as a "Back" shortcut) is infuriating when typing on forms in certain pages.

This is something that has driven me crazy for as long as web browsers have been a thing. Whoever decided that the Backspace key should be overloaded to also trigger the Back navigation button should be hanged. Never once have I wanted to navigate back when I hit the backspace button, always I intended to backspace typing. SO many times I've tried to correct a typo in a form and had it navigate back and wipe out the entire form. It is bizarre that this infernal functionality is still a thing. 

[SilverSolder]

This marketplace stuff needs to fuck off and die. After seeing newegg marketplace being full of stuff with scam prices, and listings and direct import tat labeled as "equivalent" or "compatible" or other similar ways to weasel into search results, I want nothing to do with 3rd parties selling components.  If I wanted trash components labeled falsely, I'd stick with Amazon ebay or aliexpress.

The last order I placed with Newegg, I didn't realize it was a "marketplace seller", the goods never arrived and I couldn't be bothered to chase it down for a $10 item at the time, too much going on, I just bought from eBay instead.

Basically, if Newegg and Digikey want to become the "electronics world Amazon" they have to be better than amazon, starting with the search function - which is truly terrible on Amazon and not great on eBay either.

[T3sl4co1l]

This is something that has driven me crazy for as long as web browsers have been a thing. Whoever decided that the Backspace key should be overloaded to also trigger the Back navigation button should be hanged. Never once have I wanted to navigate back when I hit the backspace button, always I intended to backspace typing. SO many times I've tried to correct a typo in a form and had it navigate back and wipe out the entire form. It is bizarre that this infernal functionality is still a thing.

Good news!  Chrome "fixed" that some years ago.  (And I forget about FF...or possibly, it's configurable enough that you can change it to whatever you like? I never checked.)

So then you have absolute troglodytes like me who use the Back to Backspace extension to turn it back on.

Tim

[ataradov]

I'm in the camp of backspace going back in history, so "Backspace to go Back" is the first extension I install on a fresh Chrome.

I can't remember when was the last time I went back from filling the form by mistake. And even if you do, forms remember what they had in them.

[rsjsouza]

This is something that has driven me crazy for as long as web browsers have been a thing. Whoever decided that the Backspace key should be overloaded to also trigger the Back navigation button should be hanged. Never once have I wanted to navigate back when I hit the backspace button, always I intended to backspace typing. SO many times I've tried to correct a typo in a form and had it navigate back and wipe out the entire form. It is bizarre that this infernal functionality is still a thing.

I am with you: I don't know what type of idiot thought this was a good idea.

Good news!  Chrome "fixed" that some years ago.  (And I forget about FF...or possibly, it's configurable enough that you can change it to whatever you like? I never checked.)

So then you have absolute troglodytes like me who use the Back to Backspace extension to turn it back on.

Tim

Tim, usually the "fix" is to change the default behaviour of the backspace key. However, from time to time I have seen regression failures on versions of Chrome and FF that flipped the default, only to my frustration after typing a damn form.

[T3sl4co1l]

Ironically, it used to be a worse problem back in the day, when browsers didn't try very hard to remember the contents of a page.

Hell, nowadays I can type a reply, go back, have a power outage, boot back up, CTRL+SHIFT+T and be right back where I left off.  The detail of page caching is astounding.

Anyway, I'm used to it, and do run afoul of it from time to time, but rarely lose data as a result.  I can see perfectly clearly what an anti-pattern it is, and why it's good to migrate away from it.

Also the plugin solution isn't quite ideal, as it doesn't work on local pages (plugins in general are disabled on localhost, isn't it?).  So when I'm testing my website I have to consciously remember to ALT+LEFT...

Tim

[tooki]

This marketplace stuff needs to fuck off and die. After seeing newegg marketplace being full of stuff with scam prices, and listings and direct import tat labeled as "equivalent" or "compatible" or other similar ways to weasel into search results, I want nothing to do with 3rd parties selling components.  If I wanted trash components labeled falsely, I'd stick with Amazon ebay or aliexpress.

The last order I placed with Newegg, I didn't realize it was a "marketplace seller", the goods never arrived and I couldn't be bothered to chase it down for a $10 item at the time, too much going on, I just bought from eBay instead.

Basically, if Newegg and Digikey want to become the "electronics world Amazon" they have to be better than amazon, starting with the search function - which is truly terrible on Amazon and not great on eBay either.

Agreed. Amazon’s search, for anything that’s not a book, movie, or CD, is abysmal.

Anyhow, I sent Digi-Key this feedback earlier today via their web form:

What kind of feedback would you like to provide?
General or other Digi-Key feedback.

How can we improve your experience with Digi-Key Electronics?
Hi!
Please, please do not expand marketplace (in fact, I'd sooner not see it at all). So many websites do this now, but it undermines precisely why I go to a particular vendor: I want to order from *them*, not someone else. If I go to your website, it's because I want to buy from Digi-Key and not from somebody else. Price isn't the only thing that matters: if it were, I wouldn't be buying from you as often. (In the 10 months I've been at my current job, I've gotten us to now buy most of our components from you instead of others.) I like DK because you have a massive selection, hands-down the best parametric search of any electronics distributor, accurate stock info, and ship quickly and dependably to Switzerland with customs pre-cleared. Stock accuracy, shipping speed, and incoterms are things I don't want to have to evaluate (or take a risk on) with marketplace vendors.

I recognize and appreciate that at least you make it easy to exclude marketplace sellers (and that right now, they seem to be few and carefully selected), but I know I am far from alone in saying that as a customer, turning your store into a marketplace would make it massively less useful and less desirable to me. For example, I've nearly entirely stopped using Amazon (where you can't usually exclude marketplace sellers) because of this, because it simply takes far, far, far too much time to find a seller whose shipping to Switzerland is reasonable, and where I won't get hit with surprise customs fees.

Comparison websites exist already, so please, please, don't make Digi-Key into one as well. Because ultimately, when web stores morph into marketplaces, they tend to just become poorly curated comparison sites.

Respectfully, Antonio

They responded within an hour or two:

Hello Antonio,
 
Thank you for the feedback. Please rest assured that we have no plans to scale back our current business model and will continue to provide the same level of in stock products, ready to ship same day, directly from Digi-Key. The addition of Marketplace vendors is only intended to provide our customers with a wider catalog of products. The ability to filter these options out or avoid them altogether will be remaining in place.
 
If you have any further questions please let me know. Thank you.
 
[name]
Supervisor, Customer Experience
DIGI-KEY ELECTRONICS
[direct email]
[direct phone extension]

[ataradov]

The correct way to introduce a marketplace feature is to have an option in the profile to permanently disable it. It is fine to have it on by default.

If you claim that this will reduce your revenue, then your intention IS to scam me, since my intention is to never buy from marketplace, so no revenue from me anyway unless I'm not careful.

[T3sl4co1l]

I have no problem buying from marketplace if it meets the same specs I'm shopping for, and the same sales guarantee (more or less).  Hmm, I should check that latter one, I imagine it might be different than direct.

Amazon is useless for making any kind of informed decision; I suspect, intentionally so.

Tim

[helius]

I've found for some recent orders that Arrow and Newark had better availability/prices for the parts I wanted than Digikey or Mouser, and it isn't any harder to deal with them. Newark's parametric search is... primitive, and Arrow's is slow and jumpy, but that isn't necessarily a deal breaker for me (since I also use comparison sites with parametric search, like Octopart).

[Smoky]

It's weird that this topic came up. I just placed my third order with Arrow in the past 5 days.

$50+ and it's free shipping plus they sent me two 10% off codes in the same amount of time.

I'm fairly new to electronics and stick to audio projects mostly.

Arrow's prices are almost 50% cheaper than Digi-Key/Mouser for the stuff I buy and collect.

I've been buying small bridge rectifiers, diodes of all kinds, resistors like the MRS25's, voltage regulators, and C0G capacitors from 10pf and up along with PP and SMR caps and a broad selection of premium electrolytics. It's been great.

It didn't take long to accrue a nice array of products with the help of Arrow's deals.
 
And is it just me, but sometimes I'll use a website's basic search process and not find the part, but if I plug in the exact part number, the part shows up in stock

[eevcandies]

Their price sorting is busted...try sorting by price, say low to high, its almost random.  I want to see only cut tape-parts...the selection is ignored...I want to see pricing listed at 1000, also ignored.
Some links show a "wrong price"   the link for a diode says unit price of $0.035 but after clicking on the link, the unit price is now $0.14  & $0.035 is nowhere to be seen at all.

The columns for voltage regulator looks like 10X .......T    O     O   W         I      D     E  (seriously):

NUMBER OF REGULATORS        VOLTAGE -INPUT (MAX)    VOLTAGE -OUTPUT (MIN/FIXED)     VOLTAGE - OUTPUT (MAX)
 1                                             8V                                  6V                                               7V


what idiot set up these columns?